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Comment by bornabox | Hacker News Reader

I think your comment on Jobs being Ives editor is spot on. They worked as a team and complemented each others shortcomings (at least to a degree). There was apparently never this kind of relationship between Cook and Ive.

But to say Apple kicked Ive out seems wrong to me. They rather wore him out and he left.

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We can speculate why he left. But I think a lot of people agree on the observation that he had probably been irrelevant for a good while by the time they parted ways.

Not so much irrelevant as superfluous, and possibly a negative influence.

To give credit to Cook he listened to the chorus of complaints and acted on it. The results aren't as pretty as the Ive era designs. But they give users a lot more of what they really want, instead of a nice case with missing useful features.

Ive actually had a lot of misses, from the gradients and flat look in iOS 7, to the infamous butterfly keyboard and missing USB ports, to the early versions of Watch, to (at a guess) the touchbar. There were also Jobs-era failures like the hockey puck mouse and the Siri Remote for Apple TV.

And personally I'm not a huge fan of the current Apple typography and branding.

So - not really missing his influence. I'd love to see Apple find a new design head who could inject more personality than the current products have, but I don't think Ive's departure was a terrible loss in any way.

>The results aren't as pretty as the Ive era designs

Not saying Ive hadn't had some great designs in his time at Apple but saying the new designs aren't as pretty is highly debatable. From what I can tell, I don't think many people found the touchbar to be particularly "pretty".

If there is one thing the Touch Bar is it is pretty.

Aesthetically it changes the entire look of the keyboard and wraps it together.

My next computer is having function keys though, so make of that what you will.

    Ive actually had a lot of misses, from the gradients and flat look in iOS 7

Lot of people thought that was a major win, compared to the childishly skeuomorphic interface (largely a product of Jobs' taste) that it replaced!

Once it settled down, agreed. But iOS 7 initially swung too hard at a look that was not as discoverable or accessible. Thin font, UI elements that were hard to distinguish, low contrast.

https://www.macworld.com/article/221357/why-ios-7s-design-is...

> The results aren't as pretty as the Ive era designs.

I'm not sure they're supposed to be. The design aesthetic of the new MacBook Pro is...chonky. And that has to be intentional. They've made a work machine. It kinda looks like one. And despite being very clearly of the same design lineage, the MacBook Air doesn't have that vibe, to me. It's a much lighter-feeling thing that feels closer to the older designs.

> And personally I'm not a huge fan of the current Apple typography and branding.

The font kills me. It's just not nice to read.

Yeah, Apple would have made him irrelevant so he could go without tanking the stock.

> There was apparently never this kind of relationship between Cook and Ive.

That seems obvious, Cook was never the "taste" person, which is what Jobs was (brutally so). Cook has always been the ops guy (his original role was SVP for worldwide ops, then EVP for sales and ops, before becoming COO).

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